[EM] range versus condorcet & others; practical purposes

[Warren Smith]

>robla: Condorcet has zero chance in 2005.  It has a small chance in 2010, and
better than even odds in 2050.  That's assuming we ignore your advice
and actually continue our work.

--what is your strategic plan?  One can make statistical estimates of "chances"
based on polls and one can estimate chances based on who will support it.  Third parties
will support range because range experimentally gives third parties the most support by a lot.
That gives range a support base who need it for their very survival.  If
we can convince them.  Now if anybody whatsoever works to try to convince third parties to
adopt any system whatsoever other than range, that will simply slow down those parties'
ultimate realization that range is the best for them.  I will not countenance
any attempt to claim that any system besides range favors US third parties more.  Because
I have done the world's only study of that issue.  Period.  Any such attempts
to confuse third parties will (if third parties are really a key ingredient
in the struggle for voting reform) therefore result in the opposite of benefit for society.
There are only two reasons to try to confuse third parties in that way (a) if you are
a covert operative of the 2 major parties, or (b) if you believe third parties will
not be useful players in the voting reform struggle.

>Right now, small associations are using Condorcet methods (the Debian
project being the flagship), and are giving people valuable real-world
experience in how it works.  I suspect that Condorcet methods will
continue to be relegated to computer-savvy organizations for a while
longer.

--good. However, I doubt this actually counts as "experience" because it
is hard to assess strategic voting effects in the absence of advertising
and political parties, and probably nobody is trying to keep
assessing that.  Am I wrong?  I'd like to be wrong.  I have seen studies
of trade union elections and the IEEE adoption of approval trying to draw conclusions, and
I was never very convinced of anything by any of those studies.

>That's not to say that compromise can't be a smart strategy.  I believe
that Approval voting, for example, would be a /great/ reform for
primaries.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ideal method would
be a form of Approval for a unified primary (where either all candidates
exceeding a certain Approval threshold move on to the general election,
or some fixed number of candidates move on), followed by a
Condorcet-compliant general election.

--actually approval is at its weakest in large elections with more-honest and 
less-strategic voting - as primaries often are.  Range is maximally superior
to approval in that regime as is shown by my sim study.  That is one reason
I want range in Iowa 08.

>However, telling people to forget looking for the best system,

--actually, if you read my post, I in fact said I *WANTED* EM to continue
forever looking for the best system.  Thank you for saying I said
exactly the opposite of what I said.  I really enjoy that.

>accusing them of "masturbation" while you are at it, is pretty
offensive.

--that was a lighthearted remark, as should have been obvious, and
I was also quoting somebody else's words not my own as I said in the post.  
Again you accuse me of something different than
reality, then attack that.     I find it rather sad that your level of reading my messages
seems to have declined to the "quickly scan it to see if I can find an excuse to object 
to something" mode.   I rather hoped for a deeper level of consideration.
wds